Summary: in-stock items received fine, but overall experience was pathetic.
Micro Center appears to be a decent enough company to deal with, so long as there are no problems with your order. I ordered some networking gear (an 8-port switch plus some cabling) from them, and had very mixed results.
The switch was in stock and arrived very quickly. This side of the order was good. However, the cables were not in stock, and that's where the trouble started.
Instead of contacting me to offer me the chance to change my order to include in-stock items, I got an email from "Micro Center Online <mcorder@microcenter.com>" stating that because the cables were not in stock, that part of my order was cancelled. In my case, I would have liked the opportunity to substitiute some in-stock items (they have pages of calbes, after all), but I was never given the chance.
Worse, because that part of the order was cancelled, if I had wished to deal with them to get alternative cables, I would have had to pay the initial $5.95 shipping/handling fee again. That's not acceptable.
Even worse than that, the items that they cancelled due to being out of stock were shown as being in stock on their website at that time.
The worst, however, was yet to come. I replied to the email from customer service stating that part of my order was cancelled (I replied to the stated reply-to address sales@microelectronics.com), and it *bounced*:
> From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@comcast.net>
> Subject: Returned mail: delivery problems encountered
> Message-Id: <2003080303371001400aoj00e@A@000000000000@comcast.net>
> Date: 3 Aug 2003 3:37:10 +0000
> To: <xxxxxxxxx@comcast.net>
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status; boundary="_3f2c8366.2b13.0+comcast.net=_"
>
> A message (from <xxxxxxxxx@comcast.net>) was received at 3 Aug 2003 3:37:03 +0000.
>
> The following addresses had delivery problems:
>
> <sales@microelectronics.com>
> Permanent Failure: 550_5.1.1_<sales@microelectronics.com>..._User_unknown
> Delivery last attempted at Sun, 3 Aug 2003 03:37:09 -0000
I find this utterly pathetic. They send customer service-related emails with an invalid reply-to email address. This appears to be confirmed by the fact that their contact page on their website lists only a phone number for most inquiries.
Needless to say, I won't be ordering from Micro Center again. I got a great price on the switch I ordered, but the overall experience could have been handled much better. After all, I only bought some networking gear - it's not as if I'd be interested in getting cables along with the switch to hook everything up, right? Customer service in this case has been non-existent.
This review was modified by its author, Sm3ghead, on
8/24/03 9:31 PM.